In the past, in order to create a video signal flow for processing a video signal, physical equipment need to be acquired and physically assembled together in a rack of equipment. A physical equipment rack is a frame that is used to hold various hardware devices, e.g., servers, hard disk drives, and other electronic equipment. Devices, such as, e.g., an up-converter, might be included in such equipment racks for video signal processing. The equipment rack typically contains multiple slots for physically receiving a piece of equipment. The slots, also called bays, are designed to receive and hold the units of equipment. The individual equipment devices may be inserted into a slot and fixed with a screw or other fastening mechanism.
An equipment rack needed to be equipped with all equipment that might be needed for potential signal processing needs. Updating the capabilities of the video processing equipment might require acquiring and physically inserting a new piece of equipment or a new card into the rack unit. As the equipment needed to be physically acquired and installed to meet the video processing needs of a user, the user needed to overprovision the rack by anticipating a peak capacity of needs.
Broadcast and media production engineers are familiar with the paradigm of physical racks with processing equipment, as discrete processing units have been utilized in broadcast environments for close to a century. Physical jackfields or patch bays are utilized to route signals through these processing units, with instant and intuitive visual indications of signal flow.
However, with the rise of digital processing and, in particular, virtual machine environments with cloud-based servers or clusters that provide media processing capabilities, deployment of processing resources is no longer intuitive. In particular, as many broadcast and media production engineers may lack significant information technology experience, the concept of dynamic instantiation of virtual machines and virtual appliances may be alien and inaccessible.